Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
5
Virtual Terrain and
Designing Landscapes
I don't divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one.
—Luis Barragan
5.1 TERRAIN IS MORE THAN JUST DIRT
Our terrain deines us; we are mountain people, coastal dwellers, or plains residents. Terrain can provide our
physical defense or force us to recognize our physical weakness, and throughout the world, sacred places on
our terrain are a source of mythology or spiritual beliefs [1, 2].
From an aerial perspective, a cityscape might appear to be primarily lat, but even New York City has
hills, and that terrain overlooks valleys illed by the mighty rivers that surround it. As a designer, you can
create a terrain that has a powerful effect on the experience of your visitor once you have mastered the
fundamentals of loading and editing it in a virtual environment.
5.1.1 f
undamenTal
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speCTs
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V
irTual
T
errain
In a virtual world, terrain is a surface patch or netlike structure of interconnected vertices. On a terraformed
sim (virtual environment simulation), this looks like a isherman's net thrown over a bumpy, irregular surface,
but on a new sim, it is displayed as a lat plane. Typically, upon creation, the lat plane of land is elevated to just
above the standard sea level of 20 meters so the avatar is not walking underwater. By accessing the wireframe
render style, you can see how the mesh of the landscape is altered once it has been terraformed, as shown in
Figure 5.1. The wireframe mode can be accessed in the Develop menu, which along with the Advanced menu,
is activated on the top bar of the Firestorm viewer after the basic installation is done. Use the key commands
of (Ctrl+Alt+D) and then (Ctrl+Alt+Q) respectively to turn on these hidden menus. Using (Ctrl+Shift+R) will
let you see the wireframe once the Develop menu is showing. Note more information about key commands
and the Firestorm viewer is available here, (http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/keyboard_shortcuts).
As you can see in Figure 5.1, after the land has been terraformed, the surface patch or terrain takes
on the distortions that provide for the creation of hills and valleys, mountains, and coastlines in your
virtual environment.
Just changing the landscape from lat into low hills adds more visual interest to your developing virtual
scene because it allows for the visitor to “discover” your space. Think about how you enter a great valley
from a mountain overpass or how hills latten to the coastline as a river nears a sea. Each landscape we
create in a virtual world can tell the story of a voyage. If you utilize that “storytelling” concept in your
design, it will have great inluence on your visitor's perception of the environment and the contents you
have built in it.
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